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Top 8 Regionals Recap and the Best Expanded Decks for St. Louis

Hey again 60cards readers! I'm back with another article. Today I'll be taking a look at the decks that I like the best going into St. Louis Regionals. It will be the first Expanded Regionals with the Sun and Moon set.

Anaheim Regionals

I played Yveltal at Anaheim Regionals this past weekend and pulled off a solid 5th place finish with it. My top options going into the tournament were Yveltal/Tauros-GX, Mewtwo/Garbodor, Tauros/Hammers, and Darkrai. During my playtesting I initially felt like Darkrai was struggling too much against Tauros, so I then added Tauros to my own list to shore up the matchup.

Table of contents

Mewtwo was struggling with Yveltal a bit, but overall the matchup was about 50-50. Still, not having Tauros-GX definitely affected the matchup. I didn't play Mewtwo at this tournament for a few reasons. Greninja lost a lot of popularity since Tauros-GX is really hard for it to deal with, so Mewtwo lost a really good matchup going into the tournament.

As for my new Tauros deck, I decided to wait until I have more time to make a better list.

So therefore, Yveltal felt like the best deck since it has the big three: Tauros-GX consistency, and Garbodor. It also has multiple ways to deal with Rayquaza, a deck that was super popular at Georgia Regionals.

Energy (13)

After Sun and Moon came out, the cards that stood out to me were Tauros-GX , Lurantis-GX, Espeon-GX, Professor Kukui, Solgaleo-GX and Decidueye-GX. None of these cards really shake up the metagame, they just make existing decks stronger, like Mewtwo and Yveltal. Since everyone else was cutting their Enhanced Hammers out of their Yveltal deck to fit in Tauros-GX, I felt like cutting some other cards and keeping the Hammers. They do not only help in the mirror, but are also a big factor against Rayquaza and Mewtwo.

I also realized going into the tournament how many people have been playing my Mewtwo/Garbodor list from Texas and it seemed like a good pick again, just changing two cards to add 1-1 Espeon-GX for the mirror and Giratina. That was the reason behind Mewtwo from Evolutions, so that I could have an advantage against Mewtwo since it become popular. I might not always include the card, but if Mewtwo is a big deck then it's definitely worth it.

Tournament Recap

R1 vs Rainbow Road - LWW

I lost game 1 fairly quickly but I knew it would be an easy matchup. I wasn’t too worried about winning the next two, especially since I dead drew and had to pass my first two turns with a Trubbish in the active. All I had to do was finding Enhanced Hammer to get rid of one Double Colorless on a benched Xerneas and KO the active with Evil Ball. After that it would take him more than a turn to power up a new Xerneas.

In game 3 I played Parallel City on him with Garbodor in play, making it so Xerneas couldn’t KO my Yveltal-EX. After that I kept switching every time my Yveltal would take a hit, so I would either Y Cyclone for 90 and set up a two hit KO if they had Fury Belt or Evil Ball for the OHKO when they didn’t.

R2 vs Darkrai - WW

Getting Fright Night early won me game 1, where I just killed two EX with it and then used Ninja Boy the same game to KO a Darkrai with Tauros. Game 2 he just dead drew and it took me two turns to set up Yveltal again and just took four prizes before he scooped.

R3 vs Mega Ray - LWL

I prized Garbodor game 1. In game 3 I had to discard a Parallel City and two Enhanced Hammer and play the other Parallel City on turn 1 since I had a lonely Shaymin with no other Basic and no other Supporter. I was a bit down about this loss since this is generally a favorable matchup.

R4 vs Decidueye - WW

I got Garbodor out pretty early and he never got more than two Decidueye on board at the same time, meaning he would fall really behind because his deck didn’t have ways to deal damage besides Tauros which would only take 2 Prizes. After that I was super safe since I don’t really care if he uses Rage when he only played two Tauros, and the GX died after killing my Yveltal. Both games were kinda similar.

R5 vs Rainbow Road - WW

This Rainbow Road had a 2/2 Galvantula line, but they didn’t matter at all since I got really ahead on board by killing anything that my opponent tried to power up. Whenever he promoted Galvantula, I just Y Cyclone or X Ball and that would be it: one prize for one Energy and Energies would stay off the board.

In game 2, I trapped his Volcanion-EX with my Fright Night Yveltal and he couldn’t find Escape Rope. I'm not even sure if he had one, but either way, it slowed him down way too much.

R6 vs ???

I really don't remember this one, sorry guys.

R7 vs Vespiquen/Jolteon - LL

This game was against Rahul Reddy. I prized Garbodor game 1 and BOTH Trubbish game 2 and couldn’t ever get Garbodor Parallel into play, which is what Yveltal needs to do to win against that deck.

R8 vs Mewtwo - WW

I took two prizes with Fright Night and then he killed it with a damaged Mewtwo that had 120 damage on it. I used Y Cyclone to make it 210 and get the KO. Then he hit with a Mewtwo and I just Evil Ball with the same Yveltal so that if he used Damage Change it wouldn’t matter.

In game 2 I used Yveltal for Y Cyclone and he hit it for 100, then I retreated and used my Mewtwo to deal 120 plus the previous 90, making it just enough for a KO. After that he used his own Mewtwo and attacked my Fury Belted Mewtwo for 130 and I just attacked with it again for 80. After that he killed it and I used Evil Ball to return KO and he ran out of attackers.

R9 vs Espeon-GX/Jolteon/Balloon - WW

This was a insane series where I would fall really behind, make a comeback by using N and hoping for him to fail on finding Lysandre. Both games were pretty much the same and he managed to get down to one Prize both times. I always seem to get difficult games in my last round of Swiss on Day 1.

Top 32

R10 vs Vespiquen - WW

I finally got Garbodor out against an aggressive deck! Both games he just couldn’t deal with my Garbodor and it was too hard for him to discard just enough. In game 1 it took me longer to get Garbodor out and he found one KO on an Yveltal using Rattata. In game 2 he basically got run over by Yveltal's Evil Ball + Lysandre with Garbodor and Parallel City in play. He did also play Parallel City in his list which made playing mine first much better.

R11 vs Darkrai - WLW

My Fright Night Yveltal won me game 1. It was too hard for him to deal with it, as it usually is when you can get it out in the beginning of the game. Game 2 he beat me but it was still really close. All I had to do was find Ninja Boy to take a KO with Tauros-GX's attack, but sadly I failed. Game 3 we had a slow start and Fright Night did too much damage until he had a way to deal with it.

R12 vs Mega Mewtwo - WW

This round was against Ryan Sabelhaus. In both games I would just have Yveltal try to hit a Mewtwo and he would Damage Change since I wouldn’t leave energies on my Yveltal for him to one-shot it. Then I would hit with the same Yveltal so he couldn't Damage Change again and force him to Lysandre around it. Every time he didn’t have Lysandre I would take a prize and then I could Ninja Boy that Yveltal out for a Tauros and KO another Mewtwo with the GX attack. If he would even power up another one, I had Mewtwo to deal with it, so he would just take his time and promote Garbodor and wait till he had a good Mewtwo that I could not deal with but I just got VS Seeker out of an N for 3 to win. The same thing happened in game 2: Mewtwo got me two prizes, Yveltal got another two and the last two were on a benched Shaymin with a VS Seeker top deck.

R13 - IDR14 - ID

Top 8

Top 8 vs Darkrai - WLL

I won game one fairly easily. In game 2 he got too many Energies too early going off with Max Elixirs. Game 3 was super close: he made a big comeback with N and Yveltal XY. I kept trying to N him down to a low number but every time he just drew Lysandre, four turns in a row.

Mewtwo helped a lot against Mega Mewtwo decks where it would give me two prizes and Tauros-GX would usually take two more prizes, setting up a situation where my Yveltals only needed to find one KO on an EX.

I'm still a fan of the 2-1 Garbodor line if I’m looking to fit more stuff and if I think the meta is going to be heavy on Garbodor. Since Darkrai doesn’t care about Garbodor, I felt like the extra space in the deck would be better than the second Garbodor.

I would consider the third Parallel City since decks really struggle dealing with it and dropping Parallel first is really important in a lot of matchups. Ninja Boy was good but I expected it to be better since I would almost never Ninja Boy into Tauros-GX for a clean one-shot. I think I did it twice during the tournament, but it would also give me the game during Top 8 if it hadn't been prized. It's still questionable how good the card is. I'm thinking about a 2-2 line of Ninja Boy and Tauros because Ninja Boy is also very useful to rescue Shaymin-EX or a stalled Fright Night Yveltal. I used it like three or four times during one of my games and it was amazing.

4 Yveltal-EX works really well with Ninja Boy since you’re going to have at least one left in your deck most of the time. You can use it on a Shaymin-EX with a Darkness Energy attached or something at some point and take a weak Pokémon away from the board for an attacker.

M Mewtwo-EX Analysis

Let’s take a quick look at Mewtwo with the new Sun and Moon expansion. We just want to fit in a 1-1 Espeon-GX line for now. I would cut one Hex Maniac since we still have a way to deal with Giratina by putting Eevee and Trubbish on the board at the same time. Our opponent can’t target both of these potential threats with Lysandre.

I would also cut a Mewtwo-EX. It feels bad but I still like having 4 Mega Turbo way too much it would be the next card if I actually need Hex Maniac to beat Giratina.

Energy (11)

A second Parallel City is great if you expect a lot of Rayquaza decks. Two Shrine of Memories are really important to beat Yveltal and Darkrai but Parallel City is also really good against those two decks.

This deck is still really good for the meta, having good matchups against everything that struggles with Garbodor and Parallel City. That applies to a bunch of decks already (Rainbow Road, Rayquaza, Volcanion and others). It also beats Vespiquen and Gyarados while having a harder time against Gyarados of course. It's easily countered by Mega Gardevoir though and having an autoloss and no real auto win kinda feels bad. That was the main reason why I let go of the deck. Now with Espeon-GX out there are even more ways to counter it. I already started to counter it on my Yveltal list and I can see other people doing the same

Energy (12)

I think Darkai has great potential and there are a lot of builds that can work. I personally like the one I provided above, but I’ve also tried Delinquent and only one Shaymin-EX with four N. I liked that variant as well since you don’t really want to bench two Shaymins when playing Darkrai. It is worse than for any other deck since you want to have the maximum amount of Darkrais on the board so that you can power them all up.

Most people play 4 retreating cards. I think that Ninja Boy works as a switching card just as well, especially since you need to get rid of easy prizes in some matchups like the mirror. It can also be hard sometimes to retreat your Baby Yveltal or finding value in some Energies left somewhere on the board. Energy removal cards help a lot against Yveltal.

Tauros Analysis

Next on the list, I would like to introduce my Tauros deck that I was working on. It's still not perfect but I liked testing with it. It was doing really good against Mewtwo and Yveltal but I lost a couple of games against Darkrai. Unfortunately, there is not much you can do to change that matchup .

Energy (6)

I'm still looking for a deck that works really well with Hammers and disruption but this won’t be it since it still loses to Darkrai. You can still take a look at it if you’re trying to find a fun deck that actually beats other really good decks in the meta.

Expanded Decks

Now after a quick look at the Standard metagame and the last Regionals, let's talk about Expanded and St. Louis coming up next weekend. There aren't many changes then again: Expanded got Decidueye-GX, Tauros-GX and other low impact cards out of Sun and Moon.

In my opinion, the best decks are Toad variants, Yveltal / Maxie, and Sableye lock decks. Yveltal is the most consistent attacker and Gallade covers its weaknesses pretty well as it deals with Electric type Pokémon and also Darkrai which would be way more popular if it wasn’t for Gallade.

Toad shuts off 50-60% of your opponent's deck so it can stop them from setting up. It’s really good against people that aren’t prepared to deal with it - Decidueye replacing Crobat might make the deck better but there are also some down side factors. First, the Crobat line has free retreat and Decidueye doesn’t. We all know how impactful Lysandre stall is against Toad, since Toad players would keep their other Toads in their hands so they wouldn’t get Lysandre.

Sableye is just one of my favorite decks and it was the first deck that I played at Expanded. I had a lot of fun with it and it actually performed super well for me so I want to give it another try.

Energy (11)

This deck is not new for anyone. As you can see there’s still no Sun and Moon cards. Tauros-GX doesn’t seem to be that good in Expanded mainly because of Gallade. Here’s where the list can change, when people might have dropped their Greninja decks because of Tauros-GX, Archeops and Giratina Promo getting more popular. I know that flareon will still be popular and I wonder if the deck can consistently beat Flareon to the point where we can cut a Archeops to either add an Enhanced Hammer to have better odds against the mirror or even Tauros-GX to have ways to one-shot other EXs that we don’t hit with weakness.

In Standard I felt like I had a hard time finding my Ninja Boy and keeping my Tauros in the deck until I found it. In Expanded we fortunately have cards like Battle Compressor that help a lot discarding one-of Supporters so we can have better access to them with VS Seeker or even Junk Hunt back some VS Seekers.

That makes it way easier to get Maxie’s since Sableye is in the deck. I love the 1 Sableye, 1 Enhanced Hammer lineup for most of the times since it actually allows you to come back in really close games by just Junk Hunting back the Hammer to disrupt your opponent until you can come back on the board.

Oranguru sometimes helps getting Maxie’s and it’s a really good card against all the Ghetsis and Delinquent that people are playing.

So let’s take a look at some matchups:

Turbo Dark

This matchup is really not that bad since Gallade is in the deck. We play a heavy line of it because it is so easy to one shot a Darkrai using Weakness. Just going for Gallade is the way for this matchup - the deck is really consistent to find Maxie’s and discarding enough cards out of your hand in order to use it.

Toad Variants

Toad is always tricky as they can stop you from playing your hand and having unlimited access to your Supporters with VS Seeker. The best way to go about this is to actually set up either Archeops against Crobat or Garbodor variants (make sure to set up Dakrai so it doesn’t get stuck also) or Gallade to control the top five cards in your deck. Fright Night Yveltal can buy you a turn in most scenarios where you Lysandre something up and promote it as they’ll often fail to take it out of the active spot or have a solid answer to Fright Night. It won’t be as easy as Turbo Dark but if you test it enough you’ll find yourself with a slightly favorable matchup.

Night March

It’s actually not that easy to deal with Night March. We have some Supporters to disrupt them but if they draw well enough they’ll just set up either way.

I don’t expect Night March to be that popular since there’s a million ways you can counter it, like Toad, Karen, Trevenant or Sableye Lock. I wouldn’t be too afraid of it even though it’s not a good matchup at all. You can still fit Toad and Karen in this deck if you would like to have a way to deal with it. That would probably be the least expensive in terms of the number of cards to change in your deck and most efficient for only two spots.

Sableye Lock

This is another tricky matchup. While your opponent tries to prevent your Energies on board to stop you from attacking, you also have your own Sableye that changes the matchup because you’re able to get crucial trainers like Dark Patch back. You still don’t have Super Rod in the deck so it won’t win you the game alone but it sure helps you getting out of the Energy lock. Every time you try to attach one or two energies they’ll get removed and taking KO’s usually won’t give you any prizes. Sableye is a non-EX and makes use of Life Dew to deny prize cards for KOed Sableyes. They’ll just Puzzles the turn after that and get the Life Dew back.

You can try to N them after they Junt Hunt but eventually you’ll run out of N’s. It’s a really hard deck to deal with but they also need to get lucky with their coin flips since Hammers requires a lot of flips.

Trevenant

This Matchup can go both ways since turn one Trainer lock is really hard to come back from. The bright side is that most of your Pokémon are going to have free retreat if you can ever find Darkrai-EX. That makes it easier to maneuver around the board if your opponent is trying to Lysandre stall something. You can also add a Baby Yveltal to make it a better matchup against Trevenant and Sableye since you’re able to get your Energies back with it. Even better, Trevenant is weak to it and attacking for just one Energy is awesome.

If you even build more than one attacker you’ll be probably fine since Trevenant is weak to Dark. Keep in mind though that they also take prizes really fast once they get going and Bursting Balloons can be really annoying to deal with.

A T1 Archeops helps tremendously because they’ll be forced to use Phantump’s attack to evolve. That’s okay for the first Trevenant but the ones after that are going to be really annoying for them to get out.

Vespiquen/Flareon

I would say that Darkrai and Archeops are the key cards for this matchup. If you prevent them from evolving, Darkrai-EX can take a lot of Prizes with Night Spear and set up KOs on benched Basic Pokémon. 90 damage is usually the perfect number but we can reach for 100 or 130 since we can set up a two turn KO if we need to. It also has 10 more HP compared to Yveltal-EX.

Parallel City is really good in early and late game. You can start by limiting their bench to make it harder for them to use Shaymin’s Set Up. The other option, making them deal less damage, is also super good against Vespiquen.

Gallade is not bad but you would rather set up Archeops. If you can set up Gallade afterwards sure go for it, since it’s a non-EX attacker and you can take prizes with it without giving up two later in the game when Vespiquen and Flareon deal the most damage since you already KOed a bunch of Pokémon and their discard pile got bigger.

Mirror Match

This matchup is 50-50. We can add an Enhanced Hammer to try to make it better but I feel like the player who gets ahead is still going to win. There’s still chance for a comeback with N on both sides even considering Enhanced Hammer.

Gallade is going to be really strong since he can one shot Darkrai-EX at any point as long as you can Lysandre it. Shutting their free retreat off is really important because it will deny them from taking a hit and promoting a new attacker after that. They’ll have to go all the way with the same attacker or lose energies on board in order to retreat which is not great at all against the mirror.

Keep in mind that Yveltal is a really good attacker against Gallade so Gallade is there to get what he can and then retreat and let the Yveltal finish the job.

Stadiums are also really important. If your opponent plays Reverse Valley you’re going to have a hard time because it makes the math really good. If both have Fighting Fury Belt, your opponent is able to Y Cyclone twice for 110 each time and taking KOs with Y Cyclone is really good. Another way to go about it is to X Ball first if you can hit for 110 and Y Cyclone after to preserve your Energies, but doing this is taking a risk. If your opponent can one shot your active, he will do so. And if he does you one shot them back so never try to two-shot a Yveltal that is getting big with a ton of energies because eventually if they one shot you you’ll be able to one shot them back with less energies.

Sableye Analysis

So I think we’ve talked about Yveltal quite a bit now, so let’s take a look at another Dark deck. Unlike Yveltal, Sableye is not an aggressive deck it actually wins without taking any prizes just by running your opponent out of resources in their decks.

Energy (6)

The deck is self-explanatory but it’s kinda hard to play with it the first couple of times. All of your attackers are supposed to get cards back rather than attacking for damage. The way you win is that eventually your opponent is going to have a dead hand or no Energies to attack with. Then you’re going to have free time to play cards like Delinquent, Trick Shovel, Team Skull Grunt and even Lysandre stall and discard their Float Stone. Once that happens it’s almost impossible to come back so I would rather just scoop to this deck and try to beat it game 2 since they can finish a match by only winning game 1 and it’s going to take a long time until you deck out.

The only Regionals where I played this deck, I would actually finish my games before time, and Team Skull Grunt or Puzzles weren’t even a thing back then. Now it’s even easier to push for the deck out by recycling Team Skull Grunt and Trick Shovel when your opponent can’t attack.

Team Skull Grunt is really good in this deck because it prevents your opponent from looping Sky Return.

Taking a look at the matchups, there’s something that we never want to face: Energy acceleration like Lurantis-GX, Volcanion and even Yveltal XY. They can be really annoying but two Energies is just too much to deal with. Even M Manectric-EX was super hard and they needed the Mega, Spirit Link and two Energies to actually get an attack off.

Yveltal

Yveltal is an okay matchup and depending on what your opponent tries to do in this matchup. Most Yveltal players don’t play Yveltal XY to get Darkness Energy back but even if they do, there are ways you can still make them run out of energies. That would be trying to Lysandre something they can’t retreat and keep discarding Energies from Yveltal XY to prevent it from attacking. If your opponent can only retreat by attaching he’s going to have a hard time and eventually he’ll run out of Switching cards since Sableye can take multiple hits from Yveltal XY and you can always use Pokémon Center Lady or have Life Dew while not giving up anything.

They can also get a bunch of Energies on the board with Dark Patch though. Flip cards are not always the most efficient way to get something done and if we get tails on the crucial flips, they can always take the advantage and push for the win with Lysandre playing around Life Dew. If they win game 1 is going to be hard to win the series.

It’s always going to be a slow matchup so I would just look to play one game out of three in this matchup.

Trevenant

This is a really hard matchup most of the times we can’t win so the best way to go about it is to stall with Latias-EX. We also have Garbodor in the deck but most of the times we’ll find Float Stone way to late when they already have Trainer lock going on.

Even if we do get a Float Stone early, there’s no way they’ll fail T1 Trevenant going second since Phantump auto evolves with only a Stadium or Energy. Afterwards we struggle to find Garbodor from the deck and even if we do have it or get it out of Professor Sycamore/Professor Juniper or N they can always Xerosic and prevent us from putting down the Tool again or Lysandre KO it.

So best case for us would be to have a lonely Latias-EX so they can’t Lysandre around it. Some of them play Mewtwo-EX but we can deal with that as soon as we see it getting benched. It won’t be able to one shot us and we can just discard all the energies from it once it gets into the active.

Night March

It’s a super easy matchup since they’ll only be taking a prize. A really good play against Night March is to Lysandre Shaymin-EX without Float Stone and to discard the Energy from the attacker. This prevents them from attacking if they don’t have a switching card or AZ. If they don’t have more than 6, we can always stop them from attacking for a couple of turns.

Usually, whenever a Joltik attacks, we want to Sky Return and get rid of our Shaymins even if Joltik has a Fighting Fury Belt since we can use Tool Scrapper to KO Joltik. We have to look at all their Energies and think like if they were our Prizes since they can usually get up to 8 Max and even that is really hard to do by using Puzzles of Time and Special Charge to get them back.

To stop this from happening because they can only take 6 prizes and if every Double Colorless would be a Prize we would be in a hard spot, we need to look for Delinquent and Team Skull Grunt to Try to get rid of some of this cards. It’s the same thing against Flareon / Vespiquen.

Turbo Dark

I don’t really like this Matchup that much because they have so many ways to accelerate Energies with Dark Patch and Max Elixir that it kinda makes it impossible to stop them from attacking. Instead of trying to disrupt the board in this matchup we’re going to try to disrupt their hand by playing N when they get to low prize count. We are also looking for Delinquent to remove as many cards from their hand as possible.

Speed Darkrai Analysis

Talking about Turbo Dark, I think that it’s a super fun deck to play with but I don’t think that is that good in this meta because Gallade is so popular and Darkrai is weak to it making it almost impossible to deal with. Sure we can play Mew but they’ll kill the Mew the turn after that and get another Gallade. It’s not going to be easy.

But other than being week to the most popular deck it’s a really strong deck since its super fast and doesn’t allow slow decks to set up their board. It kills attackers really fast and sometimes it’s hard to answer a 180-220 HP EX that only takes two energies to attack while also having disruption cards.

Energy (12)

I like Dowsing Machine in this deck just because we play one Enhanced Hammer and it also give us more ways to get Energies back. With Sableye you can combo this pretty nicely to get Hammer and Dowsing Machine back to discard multiple Energies later. This is a good way to deal with Double Colorless on Gallade, Rayquaza, Night March, Flareon and so on.

Hex Maniac in this deck is to kill Carbink or Safe Guard. It’s also good to play it early or if we ever face Volcanion-EX.

Matchups of this deck are okay besides losing to Yveltal / Maxie’s.

Yveltal / Maxie’s

Gallade is going to be very impactful in this matchup as mentioned before. Mew is a good way to answer it, but of course Mew will only be able to take one Gallade down. We have to know what’s the right time to use it and that would be when we can delinquent them to 0 cards. If we can’t, hopefully they have a lot of cards and they can’t get Gallade again or a low amount to the point where Delinquent can still take a Maxie’s Hand away. I wouldn’t Delinquent them if they had more than four and I would probably use it for 4 cards in hand.

Enhanced hammer sometimes can stop them from attacking since they can only ramp energies with Dark Patch on their benched Pokémon. If you remove a Double Colorless without them expecting it can be game changing.

Flareon

This is a okay matchup; they usually two-shot a Darkrai and we can run them out of attackers. Fighting Fury Belt is a really good card that we should be looking for the entire match since 220 HP plus Parallel City makes it almost impossible for them to one-shot us. This is another good reason why we play two Darkai from Dark Explorers so we can snipe 30 and those 30 will add up for easier KOs or even a KO a basic on itself. Hitting Flareon for 90 and Shaymin for 30 is the play and Lysandre kill both or Lysandre another attacker and kill it and Flareon.

Trevenant

It’s a really good matchup. We don’t really have Yveltal XY to get Energies back or easy KOs but we still have a bunch of Energies and that’s usually all you need against Trainer lock. We have really good attackers that attack for two and resist to it and also hit for weakness. We still have Hex Maniac to explode with Dark Patch and Max Elixir for one or more turns if we can ever use it and VS Seeker right after. Lysandre also does this most of the times so it’s just another way we can do it.

Rayquaza

This is another really good matchup. Key cards would be Delinquent, Parallel City, Hex Maniac (mainly T1), Enhanced Hammer, Sableye and Dowsing Machine. I still feel like it’s really easy to stop Rayquaza from attacking by just Hammering their Energies or even Parallel City with Hex in the same turn.

Sableye can get Dowsing Machine back and allows us to use multiple Parallel City. If you can set up a turn with a free Junk Hunt go for it. Even if Sableye dies, it’s not that bad but using it twice would definitely be great .

Conclusion

So that’s going to be it for today. I hope these decks help you test. Most of them are going to be popular at St. Louis, but also keep in mind that most players are not very used to playing Expanded and people will probably just play the most popular decks in the meta. That’s why it gets me thinking that maybe Yveltal is the best deck but you need to have a way to deal with the mirror consistently.

Other people’s decks are probably also going to be good against Yveltal because it’s the most popular and clearly the best deck in Expanded. Maybe Toad will shine again with a lot of players playing turbo decks with Battle Compressor to find them one-ofs and recycle them with VS Seeker.